


Corporate Hell

by uchiha_s



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Hermione is an angel, This is pure crack, Voldemort is the Devil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-09 01:51:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14706854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uchiha_s/pseuds/uchiha_s
Summary: AU, oneshot. Tom has been happily and inventively running Hell with Snape’s assistance for most of eternity, until a change in management prompts Heaven to send him a new program manager. “You’re over budget,” said Seraphim Hermione crisply, turning a page of the novel-length memo to examine a line item. “And your turnover rate is pitiful.” “Turnover rate?!” Tom threw down his trident. “It’s Hell. They have nowhere else to go!”





	Corporate Hell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arlene56](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arlene56/gifts).



> This short fic is for arlene56/amr56, who has been a long-time commenter/reviewer and who left the 666th comment on my GoT WIP. I had decided I would write a short gift fic for whoever left the 666th comment, and it happened to be her!

“Paging Devil Voldemort,” came a sweet, girlish voice. 

Tom, who had been in the middle of repeatedly tearing open a sinner’s gut, spilling out the entrails, and then magically sewing them up again, turned sharply on his heel to look at whoever had so foolishly interrupted his fun. 

Dolores Umbridge, a woman built like a bullfrog and dressed like a twee schoolmarm, was poised behind him at the entrance to his Entrails Room. 

How many times was he going to have to explain the damn paging system to her? If she was  _ already in the room _ , then there was  _ no need _ to page. Honestly, he wished Snape had never installed that bloody system.

The Entrails Room echoed with her grating voice. She was beaming up at him, clutching a folder of documents to her heaving bosom. “Oh, I do love that suit on you,” she gushed, beetling over to him with a girlish flush to her cheeks. It was either his devastatingly handsome face, or the thirty-foot-tall wall of flames circling them.  _ Probably my face,  _ Tom decided. 

“I’m busy,” he informed her, raising his voice slightly so he could be heard over the screams of the sinner behind him. Really, the acoustics in here were awful. Too much echo. He’d have to have Snape look into it. 

“Yes, you work too hard, Devil Voldemort,” cooed Umbridge, batting her lashes at him from behind her spectacles. “You’ve hardly used any of your vacation time this year; did you know? I took the liberty to run some numbers and you have—” 

“ _ AHHHHHHHH—”  _ Tom absently smacked the screaming sinner behind him with his trident to quiet him.

“—What do you want?” Tom interrupted waspishly. Much as Umbridge seemed to cherish these meetings, she was quite often the bearer of bad news for him. Last time she had come down here, it had been to tell him that his trident allowance was being slashed. Something about budget cuts. He still failed to see why  _ he _ , as the Devil, supreme ruler of the Underworld, had to be bothered with budgets, but every time Snape tried to explain it to him, he felt himself dozing off. 

“Yes, yes, of course,” she blustered. “I’ve only come to warn you ahead of time that there’s been a bit of a change in management Upstairs.” 

“How interesting. This could have been a memo,” he said flatly, and, brandishing his favorite non-flaming trident, turned back round to continue his favorite part of the day. 

“Well, it’s not just—”

“— _ Dolores,” _ he began through his teeth, clutching his trident and turning back to her slowly.  _ Count to ten and do not kill her,  _ he reminded himself.

He had killed off the last fourteen administrators, and Dumbledore, the man from Upstairs, had had to go through the hassle of bringing them back from Purgatory, where Hell and Heaven employees went when they died. Dumbledore had made it abundantly clear that a fifteenth death would result in disciplinary action for Tom. While Tom never troubled himself with rules or consequences, Dumbledore had made life irritating for him before and the man only seemed to get better at it with age. Thus it behooved him—for now—to not murder Dolores. “If you do not leave me alone presently, I will—”

“—Cut out your entrails. You are, after all, in the Entrails Room,” came Snape’s drawling voice. Tom almost sighed with relief but he stifled it, as he didn’t like to show Snape too much gratitude. It might go to the man’s nose and if that got any bigger they’d have a space issue. Dolores flushed unattractively; she and Snape did  _ not _ get on well and it filled Tom with glee every time. Snape was the only man who could successfully rid Tom of Umbridge without violence and as usual his timing was spot-on. 

Snape swanned into the room now, black cloak undulating around him like a storm cloud, and Tom tried not to roll his eyes at his best friend. Tom preferred his crisp pinstriped suits, and Snape, ever the one for melodrama, preferred his sweeping black cloaks that were always making dramatic swishy noises. Tom had preferred those too, in the very beginning, but he’d been doing this for so long that he no longer required a dramatic entrance. The old adage,  _ work until you no longer have to introduce yourself _ , had become a reality for him. He only knew the adage because Malfoy had given him a calendar of inspirational quotes back when he'd first been promoted, and though he had promptly burned it—he chose his  _ own _ office supplies, and none of it had inspirational quotes on it—he remembered seeing that one on the back as the flames curled around it.

“I was just leaving, Severus,” said Dolores sweetly, glaring daggers at Snape, who breezed past her swiftly, supremely disinterested in her. 

“Have you, by any chance, been in the Ball-Crushing Room lately?” Snape asked Tom, retrieving his black leather notebook from the depths of his robes. 

“No,” Tom snorted. “It’s so one-note; and besides, it’s Bella’s domain. Why?”

“Bella is getting out of hand,” said Snape silkily, reviewing some notes. “She put in an absurd order of leather boots last month.  _ For stomping,  _ she says. Evidently, ball-stomping boots are single-use. And the month before that,” he continued, still scanning the page, “she ordered eighteen elephants. We don’t even  _ have  _ anywhere to put them.” He looked up from his notes. “It’s orders like that that catch Dumbledore’s attention, Voldemort.” 

“Then go have a talk with Bella,” Tom dismissed carelessly, turning back to today’s project, but he paused as a thought occurred to him. “What would she even use the elephants for?” he asked Snape, who rolled his eyes. 

“You know Bella; she has no finesse,” Snape said disgustedly. He looked back for Umbridge, but the woman had gone. “You’re welcome,” he said now. 

“ _ Thank you Severus _ ,” Tom droned. “Now go away.”

“You’re welcome,” the man repeated, louder, before taking his leave with a dramatic  _ swoosh _ of black cloth.  _ Show-off,  _ Tom thought with a sneer, as he _at_ _ last _ turned back to his sinner, whose gleaming kidneys and liver were on display, heaped in a pile on the floor before him as he sobbed. 

“Oh, stop crying,” he said with a cold laugh. “You knew this was coming, did you not? What, did you really think you’d be able to just get away with murder? No one does.”  _ Except me,  _ he thought gleefully, and he was just about to launch his trident into the man’s spleen when he was interrupted by the sound of a throat clearing. “Oh, for Hades’ sake, Dolores,” he began furiously, rounding on her—

—but it wasn’t Dolores. Or Snape. Or anyone who belonged in Hell. 

She was young, and wearing a suit as immaculately tailored as his. She had the bushiest hair he had ever seen—it almost looked like she had paid a visit to the Electrocution Room, except she was missing the smoking, singed bits—and clever brown eyes. She had a gleaming white pencil tucked behind her ear and was holding the thickest memo she had ever seen; it could barely fit in her small, pretty hands. 

“Devil Voldemort,” she greeted, striding into the Entrails Room with false bravado, brown eyes flicking between him and the piled entrails behind him in abject, obvious, yet poorly-masked horror. “I’m Seraphim Hermione,” she said, holding out her hand for him to shake. He looked down at the hand disdainfully and made no move to shake it.  _ Ew. Seraphims.  _

“Hi. What are you doing here? I have a strict no-Seraphims policy down here,” he said shortly instead. She drew in a steeling breath, and looked down at the memo. 

“Dumbledore sent me,” she said. “I’m to be your new program manager.” 

Tom burst out laughing, and only laughed harder at the look of absolute indignation that Seraphim Hermione was giving him. 

“Program manager?” he gasped, clutching his chest. “I am  _ the Devil.  _ Not just  _ a  _ devil.  _ The  _ Devil. That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard. I suppose this is Dumbledore’s idea of a joke; I always thought he was the most unfunny man I had ever met.” 

“Least funny,” Seraphim Hermione corrected, and he stared at her in disbelief. 

“Did you actually just correct my grammar?” 

She swallowed, but her eyes were flashing. Interesting. Timid but passionate. Not entirely sure of herself yet but, clearly,  _ very _ strident. 

“I-I made a superior suggestion,” she replied, holding her chin up. “As is my purpose: to help streamline your processes and improve the overall functioning of Hell.” 

“ _ Improve _ the overall  _ functioning _ ?!” He stared at her in shock. “Do you need to take a tour of Hell? This is the most innovatively run Hell since Grindelwald. No, scratch that; it’s the most innovatively run Hell  _ ever.  _ I am the most evil Devil to ever—”

“—And the most wasteful!” she interrupted. “You’re over budget,” said Seraphim Hermione crisply, turning a page of the novel-length memo to examine a line item. “And your turnover rate is pitiful.” 

“Turnover rate?!” Tom threw down his trident, where it clattered on the floor. “It’s  _ Hell.  _ They have literally nowhere else to go!” 

“One of your employees put in an order for eighteen elephants last month, in spite of our strict no-zoo-animals policy,” she continued furiously. “Do you even review your employees’ supplies requests before they get sent up?”

“No. Of course not. I’m an effective delegator, unlike Dumbledore the micro-manager,” Tom countered disgustedly. “I  _ trust _ my staff to select supplies—”

“— _ Elephants,  _ Voldemort! Elephants! What would anyone even  _ use _ them for?!” Hermione despaired. “It’s grossly inefficient.”

“Elephants are a known and established piece of equipment in the Ball-Crushing Room,” Tom said stiffly. "Besides, that's a one-off expense." 

"What about Malfoy's peacocks? They do not even have a function, and he's set the order to 'revolving,'" Seraphim Hermione pressed, going back to her precious memo.  _She wrote all that herself,_ he realized in disgust, as she immediately turned to the needed page.  _And memorized it, too._ "And your trident collection is out of control." She continued scanning, turning pages. "Your turnover rate should be a bare minimum of fifteen percent, but in the last century you've been lingering around point five percent. The only one of your staff who seems capable of staying on budget is Severus Snape, but he only covers two percent of the sinners. Meanwhile Bellatrx Lestrange covers forty-seven percent, but she is regularly thirty two hundred percent over budg—"

"—She does the lion's share of the work, therefore she gets the lion''s share of the budget," Tom interrupted swiftly, but Seraphim Hermione was still outraged. 

"That's not the lion's share; that's _thirty two lions' shares!_ We are cutting back on her budget so that it is proportional to the work she accomplishes, and we are raising Severus Snape's sinner-torture quota, and we are going to increase your turnover rate, and there will be  _no elephants or peacocks!_ " she said shrilly, shaking the memo in her tiny, ineffectual fist, chest heaving with her fury. 

Tom stared at her in shock . He could not believe anyone could be so interfering. "Starting with this one," she continued marginally more calmly. "How long as he been here?"

"Only ten years, give or take," Tom said, "but _today alone_ I have been interrupted not once, not twice, but  _three times_ while tor—"

Seraphim Hermione snapped her fingers, and his sinner—and entrails—disappeared before his eyes. Her jaw was quivering as she stared at him defiantly, and he stared at her in pure, numb shock. He had  _never_ been defied like this before. 

"Yes," she answered his unspoken question, "Dumbledore did give me that power, too." She drew in a breath. "Things are going to be changing around here. There's a lot of work to do. Now, if you'll excuse me," she continued, needlessly adjusting the alignment of the pages of her memo, "I have to go to the Ball-Crushing Room." 

"You just turned this into the Ball-Crushing Room," Tom seethed, watching her turn sharply on one highly-sensible heel and stomp off, the clack of her heels echoing throughout the room long after she had disappeared out the archway. 

He turned around to find that a brand new sinner had replaced the old one, sobbing and quivering. Distantly he heard the all-too familiar sound of Bellatrix shrieking in outrage, followed by a loud series of bangs, and even as he plunged his trident into his sinner, he could not help but grin to himself. 

The girl had quite a bit of nerve.

...He sort of liked it. 


End file.
